Try & view compute power as
order of magnitude, vs. what useful things can be done with it.
Something containing ~100k transistors, ~10KB RAM & flash, running at a few MHz in a power envelope measured in milliWatts, has production cost (and environmental footprint) of practically 0 these days. But still enough brains to control your washing machine, monitor solar panel or open garage door w/ remote.
A few steps up & you have epaper equipped tablet that allows you to read books, simple games or check weather forecast, doing so for days or weeks on battery power.
On the other end of the scale you have datacenters, supercomputers & their energy + manufacturing footprint. With desktop PC's, laptops & game consoles somewhere in between.
When choosing between:
a) Apply budget, see how much CPU, GPU, RAM etc. that buys you, and deal with physical size + power draw / thermals, these days I go for
b) Pick physical size + power budget, see what kind of CPU / GPU / RAM etc you can shoehorn in there @ what cost, and just deal with the limitations of such device (if perceived as limiting, that is).
It's amazing what a Raspberry Pi sized computer (or further down, a modern uC) can do these days. Lean software does exist. No clunky desktop needed if you just want to play PacMan. :-)